I think the "private cop" films (mostly Spillane) films should get separated from this list, as they're not showing us another form of institutional corruption, but rather a lone wolf character that takes the law into his own hands. (Ford's character in the BIG HEAT is one of the very few cases of a "vigilante cop" pushing against the "fix" existent inside law enforcement; there are echoe of that in ROGUE COP, but Taylor's character is far more complicit in the corruption.)
I also think the timing of the films per McCarthyism is a bit off, both temporally and otherwise, particularly when we get to 1957 (McCarthy had long since been discredited by that point, having been censured in December 1954; he died in mid-1957).
I think the "bad cop" sub-genre should rightfully be preserved intact, and then broken into subtypes from there. This character, in all of its manifestations, was a way for writers and directors to displace the social commentary that had been more overt during the Blacklist era, and it soon became a battleground between competing political viewpoints. It's clear that studios made conscious choices as to how these characters would be presented, often in accordance with specific and particular political slants...but not always. Sometimes a bad cop is just a bad copy (as in THE BURGLAR, where the cop character discovers his "inner criminal", or in SHIELD FOR MURDER, where a 50s variation of the present-day "culture of grievance" brings Eddie O'Brien to a level of corruption that is as reckless and brazen as it gets.
As for Mark's essay, it's clear that he was not always scrupulous in expanding his horizons to include the full range of films within a sub-type before plunging into a film review. Though he's of course no longer here to absorb criticisms and corrections, I think it's entirely appropriate to point out omissions or misinterpretations that sometimes exist in these essays, which more often than not read as though they were written in one sitting and posted shortly thereafter without any subsequent editing. His skill was such that many are cogent and on point even when they could have used some additional attention before publishing, but this one is an example of where further research was clearly necessary in order to present an accurate assessment of the film.
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